Reuters Ends Plans for Ambitious Direct-to-Reader Service

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

September 18, 2013

Two years after Thomson Reuters announced an ambitious effort to reach out to news consumers directly through a program called Next, the company has decided to change direction and work through its Web site, Reuters.com.

Reuters, a venerable news organization with a network of 2,000 journalists across the globe, has worked largely as a news wire service, with its reports and photos appearing in other publications. Next was to be a platform to reach readers directly, but it has been plagued by missed deadlines and cost overruns.

In an e-mail to employees that went out this morning and appeared soon after on The New York Observer’s Web site, the chief executive of Reuters, Andrew Rashbass, said the causes of the decision were cost overruns and the failure to reach international consumers.

“The project as a whole has struggled to meet delivery deadlines and stay within its budget,” he wrote. “Also, it does not capitalize on our strengths.”

Mr. Rashbass, who was hired in May from the Economist Group, added: “Next is a long way from achieving either commercial viability or strategic success. In fact, I believe the existing suite of Reuters.com sites is a better starting point for where we need to go. Therefore I have decided to cancel the Next project and put our efforts into enhancing and improving the existing Reuters.com sites. We will repurpose as much of the Next development work as we can for that.”

The e-mail said that several executives at the company had decided to leave as a result of the decision, including Jim Roberts, executive editor of Reuters Digital, who was hired at the beginning of the year after taking a buyout from The New York Times. Mr. Roberts was not immediately reachable for comment, though he posted to Twitter: “Yes, I’ll be leaving@Reuters, though not right away. & I’m not leaving news. Stay tuned.”

In looking toward the future, Mr. Rashbass said: “We need to make our core strength of international news relevant to local audiences — which means, among other things, having local-language sites.”

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, said he was surprised by Reuters’s decision because the preview version of Next had been generating such interest. “There were a lot of really exciting ideas in Reuters’s Next,” he said. “What we saw in the preview was very forward-looking in terms of both content and technology. It generated a fair amount of excitement as a news organization doing something that looked digitally savvy.”